


I’ll Hang Around Forever, Until You Cut Me Down

by marycontraire



Series: Don’t Say It’s Over [2]
Category: Mighty Ducks (Movies)
Genre: First Time, M/M, This Fic Was Once Again Brought to You by My Continuing Joshua Jackson Thirst, friends to strangers to lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:23:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22072348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marycontraire/pseuds/marycontraire
Summary: “I really thought this homosexual experiment of ours would involve more homosexuality, but it’s been nearly a month and I’m starting to feel like a monk.”
Relationships: Adam Banks/Charlie Conway
Series: Don’t Say It’s Over [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1588756
Comments: 15
Kudos: 77
Collections: New Year's Resolutions 2020





	I’ll Hang Around Forever, Until You Cut Me Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thegrayness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegrayness/gifts).

> SURPRISE, BIATCH. 
> 
> Yeah, so, there were a whole bunch of things I wanted to do with your prompt when I saw it, but I had to cut a lot of them because of the limited time I had for writing. One of the things that didn’t make the cut was Festive Yuletide P0rn. Then, after I posted, I thought to myself, why not write it anyway and just post it after reveals?

It’s not as though Charlie was previously unaware of Adam’s good looks. In fact, when they were both fourteen Charlie was _keenly_ aware of Adam’s handsomeness because it easily eclipsed Charlie’s, and Charlie is kind of a competitive asshole. He quickly forgot the issue, however, when he finally hit a growth spurt in high school and caught up to Adam in height, at least, if not necessarily in looks. Charlie made up for any shortfall in that department with his considerable charm, while Adam, it rapidly became apparent, had absolutely no game.

At least, at the _time_ Charlie thought he had no game. But at the time he was observing Adam’s failed attempts to flirt with girls. In light of recent confessions, it seems likely that those attempts were _deliberate_ failures. Perhaps Adam had plenty of game. Perhaps he was off screwing some other teenaged closet case the whole time Charlie was sleeping with Linda in their shared room. 

“Hey,” Charlie says. “Were you having some torrid affair when we were in high school that I didn’t know about? Like with Dean or someone?”

Adam, who is sitting on the floor, attempting to construct one of those Ikea above-toilet storage units, puts down the instruction manual he’s been frowning at. “Why?” he asks. “So you can come up with some completely juvenile way of one-upping him now to appease your psychotic competitive streak?”

Charlie’s never before attempted to date someone who already knew him as well as Adam knows him. He’s starting to see how that might become problematic. “Just curious,” he says, with what he hopes is a winsome grin.

“Oh please,” Adam says, rolling his eyes. “And, anyway, _no_, I didn’t hook up with anyone in high school. I was too busy being terrified and closeted and also pining pathetically after you. Try not to let it go to your head, Spazway.”

“It’s already gone to my head,” Charlie says automatically. “My ego is now the size of a city block. You’ve created a monster. My colleagues and interns will never forgive you.” 

Adam snorts out a little laugh that should be unattractive but is somehow endearing instead. Charlie’s been doing this for going on four weeks now, ever since Adam confessed he was in love with Charlie when they were kids. There’s really no way to restore Adam’s dignity to a level playing field in the wake of that revelation, at least not without making a similar confession, and Charlie can’t do that without lying. 

So he’s been making jokes instead. Trying to make Adam comfortable by making light of it. In reality, though, the gravity of the admission is almost awe-inspiring: the whole time they were growing up together, playing on the same line, competing over skill on the ice and grades in school and popularity and girls — or so Charlie then thought — Adam was in love with him. And Charlie had no idea. In a twisted way, his own pre-Y2K casual homophobia had actually worked in Adam’s favor: Adam hadn’t dressed or acted like Charlie expected a gay person to dress and act, so he never questioned his assumption of Adam’s heterosexuality for a moment. Now, though, so many of his memories of that time have been tipped off their axis by that one shift in understanding. The time Charlie wrote his name in enormous block letters on the top of Adam’s wrist cast and Adam blushed instead of calling him a jerk. The time they had to share a bed when Linda invited them to her parents’ lake house, and Adam had been almost pathologically terrified of Charlie invading his side and constructed a comically high pillow wall that Charlie promptly demolished just to fuck with him. The time Adam walked in on Charlie masturbating in their shared Eden Hall dorm room and froze in his tracks, a look of what Charlie had assumed was horror plastered to his face. “For fuck’s sake, Banksy,” Charlie had said. “Get lost and give a guy a few minutes to finish.” What was Adam really thinking then? Charlie can’t begin to guess, and reviewing every interaction he had with Adam across their adolescence could drive him insane.

Charlie therefore returns to his contemplation of Adam’s looks, which are far more pleasing as an object of lust than they were as a source of competition. Adam is on his knees on his living room rug, half bent over the mess of particle board and hardware in front of him — he’s trying to twist a screw into a corner with the little Ikea-supplied hex key. He’s wearing a long sleeved shirt, unfortunately, because his house is fucking freezing all the time, and it’s quite loose to boot, presumably because, as Adam’s told him, he has trouble keeping on his summer weight this far into the season. He’s actually incredibly slim for a professional athlete. Even his cheekbones look sharper than Charlie remembers from childhood. His ratty old sweatpants, though, are currently doing very little to conceal the aesthetic curve of what is most definitely a hockey ass. 

“Feel free to help if you’re getting bored over there,” Adam says, back still to Charlie, sounding only mildly irritated.”

“I’m good,” Charlie says. 

Adam glances behind him and then does a near-perfect double take. “Jesus Christ, are you _checking me out_?”

In lieu of a verbal response, Charlie just grins.

“Don’t _grin_ at me like that,” Adam says.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m your _prey_.”

“Can’t help it,” Charlie says. “You’ve been starving me out. I really thought this homosexual experiment of ours would involve more homosexuality, but it’s been nearly a month and I’m starting to feel like a monk.”

“Not everyone is as rampantly promiscuous as you, Conway,” Adam says, rolling his eyes.

“Excuse you, did you just _slut-shame_ me for liking sex?” Charlie says in mock outrage.

Adam puts down the corner piece and the hex key with a huff of frustration. “No. No shame. Just. You _do_ like sex. Always. Unequivocally. It’s more complicated for me.”

“Complicated like logistically? Because I already did thorough internet research on the anatomical composition of it all. I think it’s time for experiential learning.”

Adam sighs. “I don’t mean the gay thing. I just mean it’s hard for me. When you’re having sex, or at least when you’re into the sex that you’re having, there’s kind of nowhere to hide. I don’t do real well with vulnerability.”

Now there’s the understatement of the century. “No shit,” Charlie says. “You’d apparently take twenty years of estrangement and lies over a few minutes of vulnerability.”

Adam winces. “I guess that’s fair,” he says. Then he goes back to the bathroom cabinet construction. 

Charlie levers himself off the couch and sits on the rug beside him. Gently but firmly he places a hand on the back of Adam’s neck and slowly turns his head towards him. “I don’t want you to hide from me,” he says. 

“I know you don’t,” Adam says. “You do nothing halfway, eh, Conway?”

Adam’s right about that. Past girlfriends have at various times accused Charlie of jealousy, but that’s not _quite_ right — Charlie is more greedy than jealous with his lovers. He wants to devour every last molecule of them: all of their secrets, their attention, their little quirks. Usually this is his undoing — there comes a point when they want him to back off and let them breathe, and Charlie never wants to let go. Adam was onto something, maybe, with the prey comment. Perhaps he will be the one to let Charlie in to stay; at least he seems to know what he’s in for. 

“I’m going to kiss you now,” Charlie says once he’s sure he has Adam’s eyes.

“I kind of gathered that, but A-plus for verbal consent, Conway. Maybe all that legal knowledge is good for something after all.”

“Don’t call me Conway when I’m trying to seduce you,” Charlie says directly into Adam’s ear, his beard brushing past Adam’s cheek. He can feel Adam shiver beneath the hand that’s still cupped around his neck.

“Charlie,” Adam says quietly.

“Mmm. Better.” Charlie dives in, at last, for the kiss. This part is familiar now, and really no different than kissing a woman. Easier, perhaps, because of their perfectly aligned heights. Somehow, Charlie had imagined that kissing a man might be more… _aggressive_, more of a battle than a surrender, but such is not the case with Adam. And why would it be? Adam has always surrendered so easily to every one of Charlie’s whims and outlandish schemes; it was a defining feature of their shared adolescence. Charlie was a fool to take for granted the power he wielded over Adam then, but he’s keenly aware of it now, and it’s almost dizzying. He wants desperately to be worthy of it, but mostly he just _wants_. Adam’s shown him just a glimpse of what is apparently Charlie’s for the taking, and now Charlie _covets._ He wants Adam as much as he’s ever wanted anything in his life, and he can feel himself leaning into the pursuit with the same single-minded determination that carried him through years of hockey and courtroom victories. 

Adam breaks the kiss for a gasp of air; Charlie can feel the warmth of his breath brushing through his beard. “You really are a tenacious bastard, you know that, right?” Adam says.

“You’re not the first person to tell me that,” Charlie says, leaning back in to press kisses along the column of Adam’s throat. He kind of wants to leave a trail of marks like some colonial conquistador — he’s not enough of an asshole to actually _do_ it, to risk outing Adam, but he _wants_ to.

“Can we just take a moment to contemplate how completely wrecked I’m going to be when this inevitably falls apart?” Adam says.

“You seem very sure that this is going to fall apart,” Charlie says into Adam’s neck. 

“Until five minutes ago, you were extremely heterosexual,” Adam says, but his voice sounds breathy. 

Charlie grins smugly into Adam’s neck, and nips victoriously at the flesh at the collar of his henley, where maybe a higher shirt might hide the mark. Adam gasps satisfactorily. “I really, really want to fuck you right now,” Charlie says, drawing back to look Adam in the eye. “So tales of my heterosexuality may have been greatly exaggerated.”

Adam closes his eyes as though steeling himself for something. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, okay. You can — we can do that.”

Charlie grins, victorious, and dives into another kiss, this one rougher, more demanding. 

“Hey, hey,” Adam says after withstanding Charlie’s assault on his mouth for a few moments. “Not here, though. Trust me, we’re going to need a bed for this. We’re not fucking teenagers anymore.”

“You’re the expert,” Charlie says, hauling him up to stand. 

Adam’s hand is dry and oddly cool as he tows Charlie toward the staircase. “I am _not_ an expert. I am, at best, a minimally experienced amateur.”

“Minimally experienced?” Charlie says, feigning shock, as he climbs the stairs after Adam. “You’ve had _years_ to explore the finer points of gay sex.”

“Yeah, years in which I was a closeted professional athlete. Not to mention the fact that I kind of have no game.”

Charlie tuts. “Really, Banksy, it’s not your looks that keeps them away.”

“Don’t call me Banksy when you’re trying to get laid, Charlie,” Adam says with a grin. He turns around in the doorway to his bedroom and grabs at the front of Charlie’s sweater. Charlie, however, doesn’t really give him the chance to lead the charge; he takes Adam by the shoulders and gracelessly but efficiently tackles him to the bed, following quickly after to cover Adam’s body with his own. Adam is almost certainly stronger than Charlie these days, but Charlie is bulkier, and he uses his weight to pin Adam to the mattress and renew his assault on his lips. 

“You’re like a human furnace,” Adam murmurs contentedly into Charlie’s lips. 

“Mmm,” Charlie says. “This can go then.” He rises up to his knees to give himself some room to maneuver, and he tugs ineffectually at the bottom of Adam’s shirt. Adam levers himself up into a sitting position to help shed the offending garment. “Christ,” Charlie says, running his hands appreciatively over the pale expanse of sculpted, nearly hairless abdominal and pectoral muscles. “I think I may be punching a bit above my weight here.” 

“You really, really are not,” Adam says with a smirk; Charlie follows the line of his eye to where he’s looking — at the sizable, visible bulge in Charlie’s jeans. 

“Pervert,” Charlie accuses.

“I _knew_ there had to be a reason for your absurd levels of confidence,” Adam says, reaching for Charlie’s fly. Charlie takes the opportunity to yank his sweater and t-shirt over his head, baring his own less sculpted, significantly hairier chest. When his head emerges from its cocoon of wool, Adam has managed to unbutton and unzip his fly. Charlie gasps when he reaches his long, slim fingers in to extract Charlie’s erection, sending jolts of pleasure shooting up Charlie’s spine. “Fuck, Charlie,” Adam says reverently, staring down as he starts to pump his hand slowly up and down the length of Charlie’s shaft, shifting the foreskin back and forth. It’s momentarily strange, having another man quite literally sizing him up, not with a misguided sense of masculine competition, but with vibrant, undisguised lust. 

The urgency of Adam’s desire kicks Charlie’s into a higher gear, and he reaches for the slightly smaller bulge in Adam’s sweatpants, now punctuated by a growing damp patch where his pre-ejaculate has seeped through the thin cotton. “Wait,” Adam says, stopping Charlie with the hand not currently sliding along Charlie’s dick. “Let me just…” Adam shifts back, so that he’s no longer pinned beneath Charlie’s still-kneeling body, and then he leans forward and down and, oh God, Charlie realizes what he’s going to do just seconds before he captures the tip of Charlie’s dick in his warm, wet mouth.

“Fuck, Adam,” Charlie gasps, burying one hand instinctively in Adam’s short hair. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Charlie can feel himself sliding deeper into Adam’s mouth with each forward pull until he slips down Adam’s throat and his eyes nearly roll back into his head. Adam is breathing roughly through his nose, face flushed, lips stretched taut around the upper shaft — Charlie can’t take his eyes off of him. The sensation stretches on for several minutes as Adam slowly attempts to swallow down more and more of Charlie’s length until Charlie feels himself straying too close to the edge of orgasm and hauls him off roughly, pushing him onto his back on the bed. 

“Jesus Christ,” he breathes into Adam’s mouth before smothering him with a kiss. “What happened to you being an amateur?”

Adam hums and tangles his fingers in the short curls at the top of Charlie’s hair. “I guess I’ve picked up a few things,” he rasps, hoarse, arching his back to rub his still-clothed erection into the divot beside Charlie’s hipbone. 

“Understatement,” Charlie says, tugging at the waistband of Adam’s sweatpants. “Get these fucking things off.” 

Adam twists and flexes his back to help Charlie pull the sweatpants down his legs; Charlie tosses them into some dim corner of the afternoon-lit room and then lowers himself again over Adam’s body, grabbing Adam’s newly-freed erection in one hand. Adam, unlike Charlie, is circumcised, and his shaft feels unfamiliar in Charlie’s hand as he runs his fingers along it, spreading the precum from the tip of the naked glans down along the full length as Adam makes gratifyingly filthy moaning noises, his head thrown back against the bed, eyes squeezed shut. 

“Hey,” Charlie says, pausing in his exploration to squeeze Adam’s balls tightly enough to demand his attention. “Look at me. No hiding.”

“Sorry,” Adam gasps, fixing his blue eyes on Charlie as he continues to stroke him with one hand and arrest his attempts at thrashing about with his other arm. “Charlie,” he says hoarsely about the same time that Charlie’s hand is beginning to tire. “Unless you want this to be over real quick, you’d better — ah!”

“Yeah,” Charlie says, withdrawing his hand and luxuriating in the way Adam’s hips involuntarily attempt to chase after it. “Yeah, let’s get to it.” He leans down for another kiss, which Adam returns sloppily. “You got, uh, stuff?” he mumbles against Adam’s mouth. 

“Bedside table,” Adam says, still hoarse. 

Charlie leaves the warmth and damp of Adam’s body just long enough to root around in the top drawer until he finds a strip of condoms and a bottle of lubricant. Strangely, it’s this that somehow drives home for him what he’s about to do, the clinical plastic of the wrapper contrasting sharply with the warm intimacy of stroking Adam off. 

“You okay, Charlie?” Adam croaks. Charlie looks over at him to see that he’s shifted, and he’s now lying on his stomach in the center of the bed, legs spread, studying Charlie with concern. 

“More than okay,” Charlie reassures him. He admires the curve of Adam’s ass and the musculature of his back, but when he crawls back to the center of the bed with one of the condoms and the bottle of lube, he pushes at Adam’s hip. “Not like this, though,” he says.

“It will probably be easier, the first time,” Adam says.

“I want to see your face,” Charlie insists, and this time when he reaches for him, Adam allows him to flip his body over on the bed. 

“Seriously,” Adam whisper-mumbles. “So, so wrecked.”

“I’m not trying wreck you, Adam,” Charlie says, kissing the inviting patch of skin just below Adam’s left ear.

“Pretty sure you were never _trying,_ Charlie,” Adam points out. “It seems to be a natural talent of yours.”

“You’re the only natural talent here,” Charlie objects.

Adam makes a noise of dissent, but it’s swallowed by Charlie’s lips reclaiming his. Eventually, though, Charlie withdraws, tears the wrapper off the condom, and rolls it on. Adam, meanwhile has reached for the tube of lubricant, but Charlie snatches it away. “I can do it,” he says. 

“I’m, uh, going to need a lot of prep,” Adam rasps. 

“I don’t have anywhere to be anytime soon,” Charlie says, and he pushes Adam back down to the bed. 

This part is the first that is very, very different than sleeping with a woman. Initially, the faces Adam makes as Charlie inserts a well-lubricated finger are obviously pained, and his erection flags. “Am I doing this wrong?” Charlie asks. “You want me to stop?”

“No,” Adam says decisively, reaching down to prevent Charlie from withdrawing his hand. “It, uh, it just takes a while. At first it’s not so nice, but then it starts to feel good.”

Charlie supposes people wouldn’t do it if it didn’t feel good, but looking down on Adam’s obvious discomfort, it’s hard not to feel a measure of skepticism. He keeps at it, though, using a generous, messy amount of lube, since that seems to be the only thing helping. Slowly, gradually, the little movements of Adam’s body stop shying away from Charlie’s ministrations and start leaning into them, and his dick returns to full hardness. When Charlie curves his finger, trying to penetrate deeper, he strikes something that causes Adam to moan. Experimentally, he tries again and is delighted to elicit the same response. 

“Fuck,” Adam says. “I _do_ have somewhere to be later, actually, so maybe add another finger so we can get this show on the road, eh?”

Charlie does, but he takes his time with this one as well, slowly working Adam back into a state of urgent arousal and appreciatively cataloguing the flushed expanse of his body as he does so. It isn’t until Adam’s stretched comfortably around three fingers that Charlie withdraws his hand. Adam grunts in displeasure at the loss of contact. 

“Hey,” Charlie says, coating the condom with more lubricant. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

_“Yes,”_ Adam says desperately. 

Charlie, who is kneeling atop the duvet, shifts closer to Adam and lifts his legs over Charlie’s knees so they’re spread wide enough to give him access. There’s a moment, just before he pushes in, where he wonders, _Is this it? Is this the point of no return?_

Then he looks down at Adam’s arrestingly vulnerable face and realizes — it isn’t really. He already passed the point of no return some time ago, without even realizing what he was doing.

He pushes in slowly, as slowly as he can stand, trying to allow Adam to acclimate to the size of the intrusion. It’s difficult to quell the instinct to thrust, though, because, _fuck_, the sensation is incredible. He can feel Adam bearing down tightly around him as he inches forward slowly, slowly, until he’s fully seated inside and Adam is panting with exertion, discomfort, arousal — Charlie can’t tell. Maybe a combination of the three. “Are you okay?” he asks, leaning further over Adam and placing a hand on his chest.

“Yeah,” Adam pants. “Fuck. Yeah. Just give me a minute, okay?”

“Yeah, of course,” Charlie says, even though he’s more turned on than he’s ever been in his life. He kisses Adam, propped up off the mattress by his left arm, and slowly he trails his right down from Adam’s chest to his stomach and finally to grab his cock, fully hard again. Adam makes a muffled noise into Charlie’s mouth, and his body jerks in a way that sends a tremendous electric jolt through Charlie’s dick. 

“Fuck,” Charlie says, pulling back from Adam to gasp in air. “Can I?”

“Yeah,” Adam half-whines. “Move.”

So move Charlie does. Again, this part is not so different from other sex he’s had — well other very _good_ sex he’s had — except, of course for the warm, sticky weight of Adam’s erection in his hand. Except for Adam’s oh-so-familiar eyes staring reverently up at Charlie beneath his sweat-soaked bangs. Adam was right; there is nowhere for him to hide, here. Charlie feels a desperate, ugly surge of possessiveness and snaps his hips forward harder, as if the force of his body alone could somehow trap Adam here with him forever. It’s stupid — Charlie’s had enough failed relationships to know that’s never how these things work — but it does cause Adam to moan and arch his spine deliciously. 

Charlie isn’t sure how long it lasts, but he’s genuinely surprised when Adam comes before him, spilling over Charlie’s fingers and his own stomach. Charlie’s been stroking him, of course, but somewhat distractedly, and certainly not consistently enough to bring him off. Charlie has to slow down after that for a minute that feels like an eternity while Adam sucks down air, recovers.

“You want me to just —?” Charlie starts to ask, but Adam shakes his head and grips Charlie’s hips, holding him in place.

“No, no, I’m good now, you can finish,” he says. His voice is still completely hoarse, probably from earlier when he was trying to deep-throat Charlie’s dick, and it’s maybe the hottest thing Charlie’s ever heard. He starts moving again, this time with renewed selfishness, and it isn’t too long before he follows Adam over the edge and collapses heavily on top of him. Adam pushes at his shoulders until Charlie rolls off, removes the condom, ties it. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he says. 

“Mmm,” Adam hums beside him. He looks absolutely wrecked — flushed, covered with sweat and his own come, and with little warm pink marks on his hips and thighs where Charlie suspects he may have left some accidental bruises. His eyes have slid shut and all the tension has leeched out of his muscles. With great effort, Charlie sits up on the bed.

Adam immediately makes a noise of protest and throws out an arm to ineffectively trap Charlie’s leg. “Calm down,” Charlie says. “I’ll be right back, lemme just take care of this.”

Charlie has to go through the hallway to get to the bathroom, because Adam’s house was built long before the ubiquity of the en suite. He throws the condom in the garbage and grabs a washcloth from the haphazard clean pile on the windowsill and runs it under warm water. In the mirror, his own face also looks flushed with exertion, but otherwise no different than always — he’s not sure what he was expecting. 

Back in the bedroom, Adam appears to be crashing rapidly. Charlie’s been told by women he’s slept with that some guys are like that, but Charlie’s just the opposite; if anything, sex wakes him up. His muscles are tired, in a good sort of way, but he’s absolutely buzzing with energy. He wipes down Adam’s stomach and now-flaccid cock, taking his time and committing the pleasing shape and feel of them to memory. He plants a kiss below Adam’s jaw. “You look like a hot mess,” he says fondly. 

“Feel like it, too,” Adam mumbles, still hoarse. 

“Oh shit,” Charlie says. “Are you going to be okay to play tonight? I didn’t even think of that.”

Adam shrugs unconcernedly. “Guess we’ll find out.”

“Are you usually okay to play? After, uh, _that?_”

Adam shrugs again. “Dunno,” he says. “Never done it before. Well, not successfully, anyway.”

“_What?”_ Charlie says, flabbergasted. 

Adam cracks his eyes open to give Charlie an unimpressed look. “I’ve had _sex_ before, you moron. Just, usually I do it the other way.”

“Oh,” Charlie says, understanding dawning. _“Oh._ Shit, I’m such an idiot. It didn’t even occur to me to ask.”

“I wanted to do it,” Adam points out. “And it was good, so.”

Charlie didn’t really need Adam’s assurance on that issue, but it’s nice to hear just the same. “Well, just as long as your teammates don’t come after me with torches and pitchforks if you can’t skate straight tonight,” he says.

“My teammates don’t know you exist,” Adam reminds him, and Charlie is thrown by how shitty that makes him feel. Adam’s mentioned that most of his past relationships tanked as a result of his reluctance to come out of the closet, and at the time Charlie thought those guys must all have been assholes, but suddenly he understands how they might not have been. Adam must sense the changed timbre of his silence, because he forces his eyes open again. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s just easier that way.”

“Sure,” Charlie agrees, rising from the bed to reclaim his boxers and jeans from the floor. 

“Charlie,” Adam says.

“I get it,” Charlie insists. 

Adam snorts. “No you don’t. You _hate_ people who take the easy way out.”

“Well,” Charlie says, separating his t-shirt from his sweater and attempting to turn the former the right way out, “kind of. But I’m not planning to march down to the Xcel Center tonight waving a rainbow flag, either, so you can calm down. Are you taking your hockey disco nap now?”

“Yeah,” Adam says, though he clearly isn’t distracted from the closet conversation. “Fuck, my phone is downstairs.” 

“I’ve got mine,” Charlie says, taking his iPhone out of his pocket. “When should I wake you up? Four-thirty?”

“Sure. Thanks.” 

Adam is still sprawled out on top of the duvet, naked: magnificently so, of course, but probably getting cold. Charlie grabs a Flyers fleece throw blanket from the top of the armchair by the window and drapes it over him. Adam grabs his forearm when he makes to leave. “You can stay, you know,” he says quietly, voice still utterly destroyed. 

“Tempting,” Charlie says, “but I have actual work to do.”

“You mean the kind for real grown ups with advanced degrees?”

“Yes, that kind.” He might be imagining the flicker of disappointment on Adam’s face, but he leans in to kiss him again anyway. “I’ll be right downstairs. In your Arctic dining room.”

“Okay,” Adam whispers against Charlie’s lips. Charlie straightens up and heads for the door, still barefoot but pulling his sweater over his head as he goes. “Hey,” Adam calls out from behind when Charlie’s hand is on the door, ready to shut it behind him. Charlie turns to look at him. “The coming out thing. It would be a serious shitshow. But I’d consider it. For you.”

“Go to sleep, Adam,” Charlie says. “I’ll wake you up at four-thirty.” He shuts the door behind him so he won’t disturb Adam’s sleep if he has calls to make and walks down the hall to the stairs, the wooden floorboards creaky and cold beneath his feet. Even downstairs at the table with his laptop open and his familiar piles of paper surrounding him, he remains keenly aware of Adam’s presence in the upstairs room, as if the Earth’s center of gravity has very slightly shifted, leaving Charlie to find his balance alone.

**Author's Note:**

> A note on the title: years ago I swore off using song titles and lyrics as titles because it’s lazy as fuck and unmemorable to boot. Then I totally used a Kings of Leon song title for the first work in this series because it was like 2AM and I was tired and on a deadline. So now they’re all going to be Kings of Leon songs and we can all learn to Just Deal With It.


End file.
